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How science works

I'm often asked by my mystified family members "What do you
really do? How does one actually work at science?" I can try to
give you a view from the inside, but if I do it is also going to be one
person's view. I work in theoretical physics. It has been decades since I
handled electronic hardware. I've never handled animals in the lab after
leaving high school. The last time I worked with chemicals and glassware
in a chemistry lab was halfway through my bachelor's degree. I extract
small signals from gigabytes of data, not petabytes,
as high energy physics experiments will soon do. My tools of the trade
are computers which compute at tens of teraflops,
and hopefully, soon at petaflops. It would be useless to enumerate
my experiences unless my methods have validity in a circle beyond my
immediate colleagues. I believe they do. This is why I'm trying to set
it down.

Bytes and flops
A byte is roughly the amount of data represented by a single letter of the
alphabet, or a single digit of a number. A gigabyte is a billion bytes. A
petabyte is a billion gigabytes. A single flops is equivalent to adding
two large number (usually 8 bytes long) in one second. A teraflops amounts
to doing 1000 billion (trillion) such computations per second. A petaflops
amounts to the ability to do a billion billion such computations every
second.

The most important thing I do is to talk with others, read what they write,
write down my thoughts as clearly as I can for them. Large parts of my day
are spent communicating. Some of my friends and family are bemused by the
amount of time I spend in a cafetaria drinking coffee and chatting. Others,
the engineers who have morphed into managers, have an idea how vital this part
of my day could be.

The main method of science is to criticize ideas and test them to failure. This
is why reading, writing and talking is important. When I have an idea I first
check whether it is obviously false. If it is not then I invest more time on
it and explore it a bit. Often at this second stage I find something wrong, and
I have to modify the original idea. After rounds of checking and modification,
I find that the thing I was working on actually leads to roughly where I thought
I wanted to go. Somewhere around this time I may begin to talk to some of my
colleagues.

Usually the first colleagues I talk to are those who are in the best position
to tell me that I am wrong. Talking is not always face to face: I use email,
and, more and more often, skype (the importance of cheap communications to
science is beyond measure). I do this, because I don't want to spend a lot of
my life working on things which lead nowhere. If the work passes that test, I
often give a semi-formal seminar to a larger set of colleagues. At this point,
sometimes, new connections come up that require a closer look.

Criticism
One of the first things that I had to learn when the next generation of my
family became able to think for themselves was to couch criticism in
encouraging terms. The years of training as a scientist are essentially
years of training in how to react sceptically to everything you hear. When
you carry this over to the rest of the world, it can give rise to hilarious
fun or extreme hostility. Scientists are human too; and there are anecdotes
about how they take constant specticism. Boltzmann was unable to take it,
went into depression and committed suicide. Feynman famously submitted an
article written on toilet paper to a journal. Some scientists famously write
spoof papers in other subjects.

A large part of my lonely personal and unsocial work consists of following
through a mathematical computation and transcribing parts of this to a
computer program which would run for several months to years. The checking
of computer programs is an academic speciality in itself.

The next step in the development of the work is to write up the paper and make
it available to the world through the arxiv.
This has two uses. One is that it established priority: the arxiv keeps track
of when your paper was submitted. The other is to open up the paper to every
person in the world who is interested in my subject. At this point I usually
wait for a few days for comments to trickle in.

After a few days I submit my paper to a journal for peer review. This is often
the tensest part of the lifecycle of every paper. Peer reviewing is anonymous.
Reviews may reject a paper as being wrong, or worse, inconsequential. When a
paper has passed that stage, it becomes part of canon. Its importance is after
that judged by how useful it is: how many other ideas it has sparked.